some indie thoughts on management, leadership, strategy and execution of software development

Tag Archives: burnout

Recently, I was reading an article on how Japanese-style manufacturing isn’t working out quite so well in India (despite having been successfully around since 80s), and that there have been several strifes lately. There was an interesting reference to what the Japanese call as Karoshi and Karojisatsu. Now, unlike many other Japanese words, these are really gross words because they mean

Curious to know more about it, I chanced upon this graphic from ILO page on workplace safety:

This data comes from Japan, and while the numbers might not (yet!) look staggering to many a folks, the trend is unquestionably disturbing, and our own deniability might only be getting compounded by lack of data from our own respective countries or industries, not to mention the social stigma that might be associated with someone refusing to ‘work hard’ on medical grounds lest they suffer an injury, suffer a burnout or commit suicide!

In the last few years, I have heard of small but increasing number of such sudden deaths among senior IT professionals – not just in Bangalore, but also globally. You can read about them here, here, here, and here.

Burnout is a serious issue for several countries, industries and people, even if we don’t acknowledge in as many words. In our industry, where heroism, cowboy programming and all-nighters are considered cool and an integral part of the software subculture, there has been a (really) small effort to address work-life balance by identifying that software development should be ably to proceed “indefinitely” on “sustainable pace” with XP explicitly advocating 40hrs a week (though some might disagree with this interpretation of “sustainable pace“). However, anyone who has ever done any non-trivial piece of software development will point out how hollow this expectation is in reality. When it is the release time, families learn to deal with their family members coming late or staying back office overnight, or working through the night even if home. Those in startup phase don’t have the luxury of ‘closing the day’, and those who are entrepreneurs actually thrive in such environment. So, is the thrill-seeking behavior at work here? Could it even be the case that we are only unknowingly aggravating the problem by hiring more people who think, talk and work like us – thereby creating a tarpit-kind of environment where there is no escaping it?

It is well-known in manufacturing that we never utilize machines more than 80-90% of their rated capacity (global stats on utilization are more like 80%). And yet, we don’t think twice before ‘loading’ human beings to much beyond their 100% capacity! Unfortunately, the data suggests that working more reduces productivity, as below:

Or, our ‘professionalism’ stops us from admitting that if I put out my case for a better work-life balance, I might be considered a loser and be considered unfavorably in appraisals, promotions and salary raises?

So, how do you deal with it, or rather, ensure that you don’t get burnt out? Or, if you are a people manager or a leader, how do you ensure those supporting you are not getting burnt out?

Important to call out here that the old harmless joke “Hard work never killed anyone. But, why take chances?” suddenly doesn’t look so innocuous anymore.